44 Annual Addrpsts. [Feb. 



the attempt to reconstruct the Greek standard, to provide a skeleton 

 corresponding in its proportions to certain mensurements derived from 

 an examination of the Belvedere Apollo. After some search Broca 

 found in the Museum of the At»thropological Society at Paris a skeleton 

 of the type required. It was that of a Soudanese negro named 

 Abdullah, and from tliis Broca concluded that the famous statue of 

 Apollo had been modelled on the Egyptian canon, which in his opinion 

 had been derived by Egyptian sculptors from the study of the Nubian 

 negroes whom they employed as models. 



The Roman canon handed down in the treatise De Architecturd of 

 Vitruvius was taken up and developed in the early days of the Renais- 

 sance by Leo Battista Alberti, himself, like Vitruvius, an architect, and 

 a curious enquirer into the secret ways of nature and the Imman frame. 

 Forty years later Leonardo da Yinci, in his Tratt'ito della pittw'a, 

 expressed the general opinion tbat the pioportions of the body should 

 be studied in children and adults of both sexes, and refuted the opinion 

 of Vitruvius that the navel should be deemed the centre of the body. 

 Following Leonardo's suggestions, Albrecht Diirer addressed himself to 

 the task of working out the proportions of the body for different ages 

 and sexes, for persons of different heights, and different t^-'pes of figure. 

 In his ' Four books on the proportions of the human figure,' published 

 at Niirnberg in 1528, the year of his death, Diirer also discussed tlie 

 difficult question of tlie so-called ' orientation ' or adjustment of the 

 head in an upright position, and lie is believed by the authors of the 

 Crania ethnica to have also anticipated Camper's invention of the facial 

 angle. Jean Cousin, a French contemporary^ of Diirer's, took the nose 

 as his unit of length, and represented the ideal head as measuring four 

 noses, and the ideal stature as equivalent to eight heads or thirty-two 

 noses. Cousin's system, slightly modified by Charles Blanc, holds its 

 own at the present day as the canon d^s ateliers of French artists, 

 preference, however, being given in ordinary parlance to the head rather 

 than the nose as the unit of length. 



All these canons, it will be observed, approach the subject purel}'' 

 from the artistic point of view, and, so far from taking account of the 

 distinctive characters of particular races, incline to sink these in the 

 attempt to frame a general canon of t!ie proportions of the body which 

 should hold good for the whole of mankind. Such an endeavour would 

 be foreign to the purpose of anthropology, which fixes its attention on 

 points of difference rather than of resemblauce, and seeks by examina- 

 tion and analysis of such differences to form hypotheses concerning the 

 genesis of the distinct race stocks now in existence. It would perhaps 

 be fauciful to trace the germs of anthropometric research in the state- 



